Bisbee Deportation - July 12, 1917

The Bisbee Deportation took place on this day in 1917 in Bisbee, Arizona.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to this day in history class. It's July twelve today.
In nineteen seventeen, the Bisbee deportation started in Arizona. So
the Bisbee deportation seems really straightforward on its surface. There
were workers at a collection of copper mines in and
around Bisbee, and they went on strike and fed up
with all of these workers who were on strike, the

(00:24):
sheriff and a posse of more than a thousand temporarily
deputized civilians rounded them all up and put them on
a train and drove that train out of town. So
that's weird. It seems like a bizarre overreaction to a
labor dispute and a very strange way to handle one.
But what actually was going on was a lot more

(00:45):
complicated than that. This had happened before. Earlier in the week,
a much smaller deportation happened in Jerome, Arizona, also in
response to a strike, and then there had been other
incidents in the American Southwest as well, with people being
run out of down in the wake of labor disputes.
One thing all of these deportations had in common, besides
workers going on strike, was the involvement of the Industrial

(01:08):
Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies. The
Industrial Workers of the World was possibly the most reviled
labor organization in the United States at the time. All
this was going on during World War One, and this
was the only major labor union to speak out against
the war. They were also against conscription. They didn't think
people should be drafted into the military, and their leadership

(01:31):
was also full of socialists a lot of the other
unions in existence at the time. We're really about working
within capitalism to try to get the best working conditions
and pay and benefits for the workers. That's not really
what the Wobblies were doing. They were speaking against capitalism
a lot. They were talking more about dismantling a capitalist

(01:55):
system because it was damaging. So it was very easy
for the or critics to paint their work as anti
American and in the context of World War One, as
pro German. They were so hated that even today it's
kind of hard to pick it apart to figure out
what the legitimate criticisms were and which things were completely

(02:18):
made up. So to get back to Bisbee, the key
issues for the workers in this in the minds in
Bisbee was not their pay. Their pay changed based on
how much copper was selling for, which wasn't ideal, but
they were actually more concerned about their safety and their
working conditions. And when the Wobblies arrived in town, which

(02:40):
was actually not that long before this strike happened, they
took a set of demands to mind management that were
mostly related to safety and working conditions. And other industries,
managers had made some concessions to labor because they wanted
to keep things going during the war, but that was
not what happened in the mine industry in Bisbee. They

(03:01):
rejected all of the demands completely. The Industrial Workers of
the World called for a strike on June. Now, these
were legitimate issues. The issues that had been presented to
management were legitimate. The frustration over all of those demands
being just completely refused also legitimate. But this wasn't the
sort of thing that would normally lead people to strike.

(03:23):
Even so, the strike went on for a couple of
weeks without any violence, until the town suddenly crossed a
sort of mental threshold. They became convinced that these striking
workers and the unions themselves had been infiltrated by Germans. Suddenly,
this became a huge threat. They were frightened by the
idea that there was a German element that was deeply

(03:47):
embedded in all of these unions. This was mostly just
a wartime anti immigrant panic, and it was also being
fueled by the local newspapers which were owned by one
of the mining companies. The sheriff and mine officials acted
on their own and what they did. They didn't go
to the army, they didn't go to federal authorities. They

(04:08):
just decided they were going to round everybody up and
take them out of town. So on the morning of
the twelve they moved through the town and they rounded
people up at gunpoint. They forced people to go to
Warren Ballpark and to wait in the stands there until
a train got there, and then once the train was there,
they forced everyone to either denounced the strike or to

(04:30):
get on a manure incrusted cattle car. Most of the
people who decided to denounce the strike didn't actually work
in the behinds. A lot of the people who had
been rounded up in all of this were basically bystanders.
The train traveled sixteen hours east to Columbus, New Mexico,
where the people who had thought up this whole plan
to just drop them off at camp for Along, but

(04:51):
they hadn't really thought all that through very well. Can't
fur Along didn't really have the facilities to just absorb
a giant group of miners, So they backtracked to Harmonus,
New Mexico, where these men spent the night in the desert.
Eventually the army came back, escorted them back to Columbus,
provided them with rations, and assigned them to dig latrines.

(05:12):
At this point, these men were all technically free to go,
but where they wanted to go was home to Bisbee,
and Bisbee was not going to have them back. Bisbee
had posted guards at all the roads to keep people
from coming back into town, and they also established a
kangaroo court where they tried people on just completely made
up charges and then had them evicted from town. Also,

(05:35):
most of the people who were out there were out
there for weeks or months, and they never got to
go back home. Maybe they met their families somewhere else,
maybe they found work in another town, but their rights
were never restored. And as is so often the case
in these kinds of stories, there was an investigation, but
nobody who arranged or participated in this deportation was ever

(05:56):
convicted of any crime. There is so much more to
say about this, and you can hear it in the
May second episode of Stuff You Miss in History Class,
called the Bisbee Deportation. You can subscribe to This Day
in History Class on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, and wherever
else you get your podcasts. Tomorrow's story also connects to labor,
but it takes place during the American Civil War.